1) Obama’s Energy Policy/Program – TRASH IT! Every recent President or Congress has had an energy policy that didn’t work. During the 1970’s when energy prices first went to the moon, we initiated a Windfall Profits Tax on the oil companies thereby taking funds away from the very entities we needed to find more reserves. Jumping ahead 35 years, the Government is doing everything to discourage the production of the very types of energy in which this country is vastly endowed. If you added up the energy content (in BTU’s or Joules) of what North America now has below ground in the form of oil, natural gas, coal and shale, we would have a greater supply of energy than the entire Mid-East. That doesn’t even include uranium where we have about one-BILLION pounds of proven reserves. Keep in mind one pound of U235 equals 300,000 gallons of gasoline, which equates to 119 years of U.S. total energy use per capita. With the right energy policy, the U.S. and Canada could be producing energy long after the Mid-East oil has dried up!
2) Obama’s Healthcare Reform – TRASH IT! Employ healthcare insurance reform instead. Reduce health insurance costs by encouraging competition amongst the providers to reduce premiums. That might mean federal regulation versus today’s state regulation; but where I live now, I have few competitive sources of A&H insurance, yet when I lived out west (where the state wouldn’t allow insurance carriers to sell highly profitable lines unless they also offered less profitable lines) my health insurance cost was less than one-fourth of what it is now.
3) Obama’s Stimulus Package – TRASH THE REMAINDER! Sure, we needed a quick injection of federal funds into the banking business to avert worldwide financial disaster. But now, any future handouts will be politically oriented, not economically motivated.
4) Obama’s Global Warming Solutions – DO MORE STUDY! The biggest thing the Government tried so far, was the ethanol fiasco. Adding more ethanol to gasoline increased the price of gasoline, raised corn, bean and meat prices (to starving countries as well as the U.S.) and actually added to greenhouse gases because I guess the Feds forgot that more corn production means more fertilizer production. Now the new “panacea” is the electric car; but I guess the Feds are forgetting how much carbon-based fuel we use to produce that electricity. Why not limit the emissions of particulate carbon instead of carbon dioxide gas (the air that earth-cooling plants need to survive)? Adding more filtering of carbon particles (that retain heat) to smokestacks of factories, utilities and diesel trucks would be much cheaper and more environmentally productive than where we are headed. Coal, natural gas and uranium produce virtually all the power in this country; so even if eventually we quadrupled the generation of non-nuclear, non-polluting sources, it wouldn’t make a meaningful addition to our total energy needs.
Dave Hammer
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